Forget 'doing a Radiohead' - seems the best way to trample the pack now is to manipulate your slathering fan base with misinformation and cheap promo tricks. The big guns are waking up to the fact that the internet is an essentially meaningless echo chamber and playing off that - rather than kick off at the thing and its thieving ears they're using it for what it is; a huge media machine.

So this week we learned that Coldplay 'split', before they released a brand new track as a free download and 600,000 people listened to it. Christ, Phil Collins 'died' but came back from the dead to "retire from music" - other journalists; assertions not ours - Prince stopped getting annoyed at 13-year-old YouTube spods and rode the wave with a highly-camera phoneable rendition of 'Creep' at Coachella and Morrissey was rather sly with the phrasing of a net-bound press release to imply that NME had pulled tens of thousands of pounds worth of funding from last week's Love Music Hate Racism carnival and that he, the bold knight, had stepped in to save the day. Bad form? Let's hope not, eh.